When conceiving this review in my head during and after seeing 2012, Roland Emmerich’s latest venture into Disaster Porn, I erroneously laid the blame at James Cameron’s (Titanic) feet. I forgot that Emmerich essentially started it a year before Cameron when he destroyed New York and the White House in Independence Day.
But we’re 13 years past that grand popcorn feast’s release and the Disaster Porn genre, thanks in no part to Emmerich himself (see The Day After Tomorrow – quite frankly Emmerich has to choose which way civilization is going to end already), has only gone downhill. Where Independence Day had characters performed by actors you could rally behind (Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman and Will Smith in his star making role) and a gung-ho action plot with enough pathos scattered about to give a damn about what was happening, Emmerich’s 2012 manages to make you wish for humanity’s end.
Featuring John Cusask (looking like a guy cashing a check) in the lead role as Jackson Curtis, a divorced father or two who, gosh darnit, needs to reconnect with those little rascals, the film does little to make the audience actually give a damn about who lives and who dies. Curtis’ ex, Kate, played by the blank slate that is Amanda Peet, is only there as a plot device and is given nothing to do or say that we either haven’t seen or heard before or could possibly care about. Marginally more interesting is Kate’s new beau, Gordon (played by The Wire’s Thomas McCarthy), a plastic surgeon who is thrust into a pilot’s seat because…oh hell…who cares? Gordon is only there to be marginalized and then dispensed with so that those two lovebirds, Jackson and Kate, can get back together. Gordon’s exit from the film is so arbitrary, that less time is spent on his send off than a minor science nerd character’s facial expressions in the last reel.
Things start off intriguingly enough, with the discovery that solar explosions are heating up the Earth’s core and disrupting the tectonic plates. Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character, scientist Adrian Helmsley, by far the most interesting character and best actor and the only thing in 2012 to recommend, brings the information found to a Presidential aide, which puts into motion the President (Danny Glover) and other nations coming together to build giant arks to keep some semblance of humanity alive once everything goes to hell.
But, like Michael Bay’s (another king of Disaster Porn) Transformers (the first one, I refuse to see the second) halfway through it all becomes too damn much to tolerate. Emmerich’s 2012 becomes overbearing at first and then brutalizing after that. I don’t need to be brutalized when I go to the movies. At some point I just wanted out, but my desire to give the film its entirety won out. Apparently, being brutalized is something I feel I deserve?
I don’t mind escapism, or silly action pictures or films filled with disaster, but 2012 is just shy of being nothing more than front to back disasters. There’s little in the way of plot, no character development and little care as to what happens to anyone on screen. It’s incredibly over long, over wrought and over cast (did we need George Segal and Blu Mankuma’s sub plot as old jazz musicians on a cruise ship? Add to that list Zlatko Buric as the Russian Yuri Karpov, who should have come with subtitles he was so unintelligible, and the twins playing his sons – real-life twins Alexandre and Phillippe Haussmann).
In the end it all works out and, nary a month after surviving the great shift of the Earth, the three Arks steer towards Africa (the mother country) to repopulate and screw up humanity all over again.
There, you don’t have to see the damn thing now. I’m embarassed enough that I put $9 towards the film’s $65 million dollar opening weekend. It doesn’t deserve to make any more money. The picture of the film’s poster says “We Were Warned”. Pretty much sums it up.
